Thank You for 100k: A Journey Through 2024 and Beyond

Seattle Data Guy Wrapped 2024

2024 is either already over or about to be, depending on where you live, and I wanted to put out one final newsletter.

One of the things I enjoy doing is at the end of the year reviewing the work I have been doing under the Seattle Data Guy umbrella. So, in this article, we will be reviewing the client trends I have seen, highlighting some of the top pieces of content I have put out, as well as discussing some of the new goals for 2025.

It’s actually beneficial because I looked back at my 2023 SDG review, and I realized I totally forgot about running data dinners.

So let’s talk about content, consulting, and what you can expect in 2025 from the Seattle Data Guy!

But before doing that!

Thank You For 100k!

I just wanted to start by saying thank you to all my readers, subscribers, and YouTube viewers. In 2024 I crossed 100k subscribers both on Youtube and Substack. I really appreciate all your support.

The fact that so many people read, like, share, watch, and subscribe really means a lot. I really want to double down on content next year, so I hope to provide even more value to SDG readers and watchers.

By The Numbers

Speaking of numbers, here are a few more that I’d like to share with y’all of some personal accomplishments.

• I wrote 70+ articles and newsletters, both here and on the Seattle Data Guy website.

• Grew a technical consulting community to over +1400 members!

• Filmed 28 videos and 35 lives

• Held one virtual conferences with over 4500 people signing up(You can find the videos here for the most recent one here)

• Landed well over a dozen different projects(ranging from greenfield data stacks and migrations to product analysis)

But enough metrics.

Let’s review everything from the kinds of client work I focused on to the most popular articles and videos I shared. Here’s what we’ll cover:

1. Project Trends - I will review the types of projects I took on because they’ll provide some insight into what is going on in the data world.

2. Most Popular Articles - There are so many articles that I published this year that I wanted to go over just a handful that y’all really enjoyed.

3. Most Popular Videos - In many of my newsletters, I will share a video from the Seattle Data Guy YouTube channel. Here are some of the most popular from 2024.

4. Conference - This was the second year I co-ran the Data Engineering and Machine Learning Summit. So, I wanted to share some of the talks linked below!

5. Advising - Over the past year, I have found myself advising more about products, and I wanted to share some of their recent feature releases.

1. Project Trends

• SQL Server And On-Prem Migrations - This year I had multiple SQL Server migrations to cloud data warehouses. Actually, this has been a theme for the last two years but I’d say it really peaked this year(or maybe it’s just a false peak). I also noticed another trend that would happen post migration. Which is the next one below.

• Increasing Data Sources - Every company would migrate, then they’d be surprised how easy it’d be to pull in even more data sets as they could worry less in terms of compute and storage in turn they’d end up increasing the amount of data sources being pulled into the data warehouse and gain new insights.

• Fractional Data Teams - I had a few projects this year where the company had a data team in the past, but moving forward, they wanted some level of fractional data team or specialist instead. These projects, in particular, involved smaller companies that had data teams with 2-5 people on them originally. However, wanted to see if they could do more with less.

• Consolidation In Tooling - There were several projects this year where the goal was to reduce the amount of tools being used. Either when building the data stack or minimizing the current one.

2. Popular Articles

In 2024, I really made an effort to publish at least four newsletters a month with some form of graphic. I actually kept this up this year and even had a few months when I put out five newsletters.

Here are some of the ones you engaged with the most!

1. 🔒 Don't Lead a Data Team Before Reading This - I wrote this article because I had recently chatted with 2-to 3 data leaders who say that the default state of most data teams is a failure. But I don't think most data teams are set up for success to start with(I also don't believe that failure is the default state). So, I wrote this article to help new data leaders get a better understanding of how they can lead their teams to success.

2. Data Warehousing Essentials: A Precursor - If you're looking for a basic rundown of data warehousing, then here it is. In this article, I'll go through some of the basics in terms of dimensional modeling as well as discuss an example of a common data modeling decision you often have to make.

3. 🔒Behind the Scenes of SQL: Understanding SQL Query Execution - How does SQL go from English into the lingua franca of data? What happens behind the scenes? Let's dig into it in this article.

4. 🔒Thinking Like an Owner: Elevating Your Data Team's Impact In 2025 - It can be tempting as an IC to sit back and let your director or other teams dictate the work that you take on. But the truth is, most people I've talked to, whether it be directors or high-level ICs, somehow had to push to get the work that they wanted to grow in their careers. So, let's talk about how you can take ownership of your career and projects!

5. Data Engineering 100-Day Crash Course - It can be challenging to break into data engineering directly. There seems to be a need to learn a whole plethora of skills that range from programming to data modeling. Perhaps that's why I often see a lot of individuals moving laterally into data engineering; many people go from data analyst to data engineer. Here is a 100-day crash course to get you started on your data engineering journey.

My favorite article from 2024:

🔒 Beyond Big Tech: The Reality Of Data Engineering Outside Silicon Valley - This was one of my favorite articles. I think it can be easy to feel like everyone else is using the newest technologies and working on hard data problems. But depending on where you work and what team you're working on, it can drastically impact your data stack. So, let's review what other data stacks look like outside of the Bay.

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3. Some Of My Favorite Videos

Video, in general, hasn't been my main focus over the past two years as I have been writing more and had plenty of work on the consulting side. But I still managed to produce a decent amount of videos!

Here are just a few of my favorites.

1. Going From Data Engineer To Head Of Data - How To Run A Data Team Successfully

2. How And Why Data Engineers Need To Care About Data Quality Now - And How To Implement It

3. Using AWS Lambda As A Data Engineering - Automating An API Extract With AWS Lambda And Eventbridge

4. Data Modeling Where Theory Meets Reality - How Different Companies I Worked At Modeled Their Data

5. Snowflake vs Databricks - And the Battle For Iceberg

4. Conference

Along with all of the consulting and advising, I co-ran the DEML(Data Engineering And Machine Learning Summit) again this year. We had well over 4500+ sign up. We also set up a separate Youtube channel for the content, so it’s easy to get to! So check out some of the videos below!

1. Multimodal RAG with Bedrock

2. All about Iceberg and its Catalogs - What Is Apache Iceberg

3. Data Management for LLMs

4. Innovate and Lead Strategies for Success with Next Gen Data Stack

5. Event Tracking Redefined A Data Engineer's Guide to Creating Actionable Insights

5. Advisory

Last year, I put the advisory and conferences under one heading. However, I found that this year, advising took up more of my time. Which I find awesome.

What I have really enjoyed about advising is it lets me be involved in projects and products that are bigger than my one-person operation. It’s also great to see how much these companies have developed in terms of features in the last year.

Here are a few highlights from working with them.

Estuary

Towards the latter half of this year, Estuary was on a tear of partnerships and feature releases. For one, they released their Private Deployments. This means you can host Estuary’s data plan inside of your cloud. They also partnered with several other solutions and service providers like StarTree, Outlier Data, and more!

Mage

If you missed it, Mage has been releasing a lot of great features as well, including dynamic blocks and also Mage Pro! It’s been awesome to see the community around Mage grow as well as the team get involved with communities such as the DataTalksClub who hosts the DE Zoom Camp.

Roe AI

I just started working with Roe, but it’s fantastic to hear about the projects they are taking on. If you’re trying to analyze PDFs or unstructured data, you should schedule some time with Richard and Jason.

Seattle Data Guy In 2025

Once again, thank you to all my readers and subscribers. Your reading, sharing, and liking of any of my content means the world to me. As someone who has been publishing out content online for 7-8 years, it keeps me excited to write more!

Now, looking towards 2025, here are just some of the things you can expect, but let me know if you have topics or events you think I should coordinate!

• Finishing My Book On Data Leadership—Towards the end of this year, I started writing a book on leading data teams. I had a conversation with several CEOs who were talking about the challenges they faced with their data leadership. In my experience, many data leaders get thrown into leading data teams with no real training. So, sure, you can complain about how they might be leading, but I do think we could do a better job preparing them.

• Lauch Out Webinars and Mini-Courses Specifically For The Newsletter—I am already starting to film and plan some mini-courses and webinars for paid newsletter members. My goal will be to provide even more in-depth content on topics ranging from how to set up your data infrastructure to running data projects.

• Data Dinners—Looking back, this has been on my list since 2022, and I still haven’t done it. Perhaps this is one of those ideas that will never happen, but I am going to try it one more time! I’d like to organize together dinners for data leaders to provide them with a space to share and grow with others.

• Technical Freelancer Community—In 2025, I really want to double down on two things: data leadership content and content for technical consultants. Much of that content will be on the TFA Community. I hope to grow the group to 10,000 members by 2026 by creating a space where people can ask questions and find helpful content on their consulting journey.

• Spend Less Time In Front Of A Keyboard—This goal will conflict with some of the ones mentioned above. But I do feel like I might spend a little too much time typing away at my keyboard.